Uh oh: California solar plant fries thousands of birds in mid-flight

posted at 10:01 pm on August 18, 2014 by Mary Katharine Ham

Workers at a state-of-the-art solar plant in the Mojave Desert have a name for birds that fly through the plant’s concentrated sun rays — “streamers,” for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair.

Federal wildlife investigators who visited the BrightSource Energy plant last year and watched as birds burned and fell, reporting an average of one “streamer” every two minutes, are urging California officials to halt the operator’s application to build a still-bigger version.

The investigators want the halt until the full extent of the deaths can be assessed. Estimates per year now range from a low of about a thousand by BrightSource to 28,000 by an expert for the Center for Biological Diversity environmental group.

The facility has concerned environmentalists in the past, as its construction bladed over 3,500 acres of virgin desert. Being California, the state government required BrightSource to relocate a bunch of desert gopher tortoises to the tune of $22 million. The installation also endangers pilots flying the busy Los Angeles–Las Vegas corridor; they can be dazzled by the intense light.

It remains to be seen if regulators will stop the plant’s operation, but at least the world’s largest bug zapper should educate environmentalists and green energy boosters.

For too long, the public has been told that energy production is less a matter of physics than one of morality. Renewable energy like solar and wind are sold as “good” while reliable energy sources like oil and coal are “evil.” Methods like hydroelectric, nuclear and natural gas all were initially sold as clean and green, but became demonized the instant they turned a profit or revealed unintended consequences.

Blowback

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Comments

This has always been my biggest concern with solar panels. They can act as both a mirror and a magnifying glass. Just imagine a vast area covered with them and now imagine a commercial airliner going over that area.

Lol on that. Hansen et al have been, as per lead ipcc author Stephen Schneider’s instructions, “offering up [bs] scary scenarios” for decades. Temperatures to rise 5° in 30 years with 4.5 feet of sea level rise? Said in 1986? Then that’s what we should be seeing… NOW. But we see… … nothing. No rise in temperature, no rise in sea level. None. As far as I can see. And feel. And any “data” showing the most minimal of rises is subject to serious doubt.

Not one of the Chicken Little’s outrageous predictions of doom has ever even come close to coming true. It’s ridiculous. And they never stop with their constant fear mongering. A broken record. It’s Deja Vu again and again. And the starkness of their glaring inaccuracies is almost shocking in the sense that few among the leftists and MSM see this at all. Indeed they seem to think that’s Hansen’s and the climate model predictions have actually come true, that our world is right now in the process of boiling away. Not: http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-measurements-running-5-year-means/

It’s noted and the evidence is given for: The Sea level in the San Francisco Bay is lower now than 70 years ago.

My comment:

After a century of unrestrained runaway hockey stick style warming we should have had 10 to 20 meters of sea level rise like the Chicken Little Brigade keeps saying will happen.. someday. But we got… nothing. Zero. Oh yeah, less than zero. Something doesn’t add up.

Btw, MKH, it’s good to have more energy or “climate change” related posts again! It does seem, unfortunately, that since Erika left there have been few and far between on that. It would be good to have more, to expose the leftist bullsh|ters before they start succeeding in bamboozling conservatives again.

What would John Muir think? Environmentalists in the 2040s will be dumbfounded that industrial-scale wind and solar plants were embraced by the “greens” of the 20-teens. I expect that tearing down the bird crucifixes will be a big enterprise in the next few decades.

Just south of here there is a huge windmill farm, as in huge windmills and a lot of them spread our for miles.

Locals down there call them “birdchoppers”. You wouldn’t believe the carnage, especially during migration seasons.

novaculus on August 18, 2014 at 10:12 PM

The problem with wind turbines is the power generator boxes downwind of the turbine, which make attractive nesting sites for predatory birds with a bird’s-eye view of surrounding terrain and prey. The turbines often have vanes to keep them pointed toward the wind, so that the generator boxes are always downwind of the turbine blades.

Birds, particularly relatively heavy predatory birds, like airplane pilots, tend to take off upwind (through the plane of the turbine blades) in order to increase wing lift. In high winds, a bird might have only a fraction of a second between the passage of the blades, and one ill-timed takeoff can mean bye-bye birdie.

This problem could be avoided fairly cheaply by having cone-shaped tops on the generator boxes and support pylons to discourage birds from nesting there, but so far the genius regulators of the wind industry haven’t thought of requiring them.

Look, they built it in the desert but everyone knows that solar needs to be converted into something or it just stays hot (like your car under the sun). The panels capture the heat and then those boneheads pump up water from the dinosaur age aquifer, run it through pipes that create steam which turn the turbines and generate the electricity. The desert has no water to spare! California is in a drought. The Colorado River is down. Ground water pumping is at 69% already and climbing. Jerry Brown’s lieutenant governor wants to migrate California residents to other states (how’s that gonna work?), and this solar plant is sucking up water while frying birds and blinding pilots.

If you want the solar plant to come up with a solution, especially during the design phase when you can make changes, have them pay a penalty (or tax) on the externality of bird kills, so much for each bird fried. Might even make it a graduated scale. For a given size plant, the first thousand bird kills costs them $100 a bird, the next thousand costs them $200 a bird, the next thousand costs them $400 a bird, etc. perhaps done on an annual basis.

They’ll figure something that minimizes their penalties while being economically feasible.

Might also have a threshold, maybe pretty generous, that if exceeded, the plant no longer qualifies for solar/wind subsidies for a year and they still have to pay the penalties for bird kills. THAT will get their attention.

Not quite. I had a wild turkey fly over our security fence one night and slam into the side of the turbine building and break it’s neck. It set off the security motion detectors when it crossed the fence resulting in an intruder alarm. Our security shift supervisor apprehended the dead turkey and then field dressed it and took it home for dinner. Meanwhile I had to make a couple of reports about it to the Virginia dept. of Game and Fish and the NRC….and I didn’t even get a bite of dressing.

“Renewable energy” is such a buzzword of the left. When we have, conservatively, two hundred to four hundred years of various fossil fuels, they don’t need to be renewable. Long before they are depleted, the free market will develop new, feasible and sensible technologies to replace them…and the corporatism hoisted on us today.

It looks as though the plant is not strictly solar. It runs on natural gas as well. They have asked to increase their gas consumption.

It’s been lauded as the world’s largest solar power plant, but the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System could also be called the world’s largest gas-fired power plant (largest as in physical size, not gas consumption). Each of the 4,000-acre facility’s three units has gas-fired boilers used to warm up the fluid in the turbines in the early morning, to keep that fluid at an optimum temperature through the night, and to boost production during the day when the sun goes behind a cloud.

The project’s managers, BrightSource Energy and NRG Energy, originally estimated that the plant’s main auxiliary boilers would need to run for an hour a day, on average, to allow the plant to capture solar energy efficiently. But after a few months of operation, they’re now saying they need to burn more gas, with the boilers running an average of five hours a day.

To that end, the companies have asked the California Energy Commission (CEC) to change the project’s license to allow Ivanpah to burn more than 1.5 billion cubic feet of gas a year, and the plant’s operators say that change won’t have any environmental impact.

“Renewable energy” is such a buzzword of the left. When we have, conservatively, two hundred to four hundred years of various fossil fuels, they don’t need to be renewable. Long before they are depleted, the free market will develop new, feasible and sensible technologies to replace them…and the corporatism hoisted on us today.

RonRon on August 19, 2014 at 8:31 AM

Renewable energy doesn’t exist. It’s a fallacy and a leftist fantasy. The so called renewables come from the same place all those horrible fossil fuels came from. The sun. It’s just that all those stored up fossil fuels were laid down and stored over millions of years. The renewables can only be produced over a growing season.

Renewable energy doesn’t exist. It’s a fallacy and a leftist fantasy. The so called renewables come from the same place all those horrible fossil fuels came from. The sun. It’s just that all those stored up fossil fuels were laid down and stored over millions of years. The renewables can only be produced over a growing season.

Oldnuke on August 19, 2014 at 9:39 AM

Kind of.
Some still include Hydro in their definition of renewables, though most states with a renewable fuel standard do not. The intention of RFSs is to drive technological improvement and investment. It is difficult to invest in hydro as the base technology hasn’t changed much since the water wheel was invented.

I automatically disregard anyone who talks about renewables. If they were truly concerned with climate change, they would be all in favor of carbon free, which would include hydro and nuclear.

James Hansen, who is one of the original global warming fear merchants, is on board with a massive conversion to nuclear.

Wood burning, biofuels, and ethanol are also sometimes considered renewable even though they are very carbon intensive energy sources.

The policies being advocated do not follow science for the betterment of the environment. They follow money and control for the betterment of the policy-makers.

After an oil spill, the environmentalists will show pictures of seabirds covered in oil 24 hours a day – but make no mention of the thousands and thousands of birds that are killed each year at Altamont Windfarm. Now we can add thousands of “streamers” from BrightSource to the list – but ignore it all – in the name of “green, renewable, clean energy”.

You see the dark patch in the foreground of the WUWT pictures. It’s a golf course. IN the middle of the Mojave, a 100 miles from any metropolitan area.
Draws the wild birds in like an oasis, which it is. Draws them fron the hills to the North. Which means the solar bake ovens are in a direct line between the birds natural habitat and the artificial oasis of the golf course.